So I’m lying in bed with the dreaded man flu and very conscience that I need to post to my blog! It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post and I’m chastising myself for breaking the golden rule, ***Add REGULAR Content***.
In my defense, it has been a busy time though and man flu can be very serious, although some women fail to understand this of course…

But back to the content. (Please be careful reading this, I’ve just coughed and spluttered all over the screen!).

It’s amazing how much you miss writing when other things take a bit of a priority over your posting activities! But there is something you can do (and I should have done!) when you’re in the writing mood and you happen to have time to yourself to take care of those ‘other priority’ moments in life.

Write some backup content.

For instance, if I had taken my own advice and produced some emergency backup posts, then I wouldn’t have worried so much about writing on my blog today and could have been doing my own man flu stuff.

I’ve heard plenty of chocolate can help a man to recover when it gets really bad.

There’s also some great news about backup/emergency posts if your a WordPress user!

With WordPress, you have a couple of choices about how you want to approach this.

1. You can write some posts and save them as drafts giving you the choice of when you want to release them.
2. You can also write your content and ‘pre-schedule’ that post to be published sometime in the future.

Thinking about it, I actually like the sound of the second one.

Pre-scheduling is a great way to take full advantage of those moments when you are in the writing ‘zone’ and have a respite from other distractions (loved ones/World Cup/Game of Thrones etc.).

And when you can write it’s amazing how you can really churn out some great information that your readers will find both useful and informative. If say you were looking at releasing
at least 1 decent post a week, not a bad target by the way, then you could write 4 in one sitting, pre-schedule those posts on WordPress and release 1/week for the next month.

Do that frequently and you’ll soon have most of the year covered, you could even then start to pre-schedule other content so that you’re now realising decent work twice a week, get the picture?

So how do you pre-schedule content with WordPress?

Now this bit is fairly straight forward.

Write your post.

Go to the ‘Publish’ section of your post

Click ‘Edit’ next to ‘Publish immediately’

Set your required time and date for putting your content ‘live’ and click OK.

Then click the ‘Schedule’ button.

That’s it!

In fact, I managed to make it from my bed to the main computer and pre-scheduled this post to publish in an hour (it was touch and go on whether I would make it though!). Here’s a quick screenshot:

Hope this helps.

So how do you plan for those times when you physically can’t write?

Do you stockpile material or pre-schedule your content on WordPress on other platforms?

Seriously you’re right about the prewriting stuff, I’ve had a few weeks on and off where I’ve not been able to get any content written for the blog. and I like to keep mine well updated at all times as a rule.

I can remember writing a years worth of content once and prescheduling it. (Works very well)

Hi Jon, your post may provoke me to try and do what you say. Although I don’t have illness as an excuse, I too have not posted for a couple of weeks. I have to have something on my mind to post about and then get it off my chest as it where when I’m in the mood. Unfortunately, that doesn’t come often enough. My only problem with your suggestion, is that when I am in the mood for writing a post, it’s usually about a specific topic and once that has been written, I’m not in the mood to then think about something else to write.

appreciate your point about being in the mood for a particular topic. I suppose you could just put a couple of articles ‘in the bank’ so to speak, so when you need help with content you have something to fall back on!

How about not publishing 1 in 4 articles for instance? Save that 1 article in WordPress and you’ll soon get a few that add up.

Just my thoughts really. For me, I’m either all or nothing so when I do get writing it flows quite nicely.